Explain The Sequence And Rate Of Sequence Of Development From Birth To 19 Years

Our understanding of child development is the result of decades of observations and research. This has given us the knowledge to predict how children will develop in the five main areas: physical, communication, cognitive, social, emotional, behavioural and moral. Patterns of development can be understood in terms of sequence and rate. The sequence of development from birth to 19 years describes the order in which we expect things to happen. We use this to predict the development of a child, as well as to observe and report if they are not following the expected pattern of development.
So our knowledge of physical development would tell us that a child will probably sit up independently before they are able to stand up independently. Following
Rate of development describes how fast and at what age a child reaches the expected stages of development. This varies much more between individual children than the sequence of development. We do still use milestones (like the early learning goals) to mark what stage we expect a child to reach by a certain age. We do this whilst using our knowledge of the individual child to refine our predictions depending on whether we expect them to reach a stage earlier or later than most children.
We may know that a child aged around 2 is expected to understand and speak approximately 200 words. This is based on the combination of the expected sequence and rate of development of communication for most children. However our knowledge of this particular child is that they speak English as an additional language and only their home language is spoken by their parents.
Since we understand this expected sequence, we can predict the order that the different stages will be reached in. Whilst we know that it usually is reached around age 5, we also know that this can vary by up to 2 years before or after, giving us a range from 3 – 7 years old. This is the rate of development. Children are all individuals and usually follow the expected pattern but at their own unique rate. It is difficult to see how a child could read a group of letters as a word without passing through the shape and letter recognition stage of this sequence. Social, emotional and behavioural development also follows an expected sequence, although this may be more difficult to measure. We know that toddlers aged 1 to 3 will probably struggle with turn taking and sharing. This can be developed through lots of opportunities to play simple turn based games, passing objects around in a circle to hold at story time, swapping instruments after each song etc. Before a toddler can appreciate the need to share and take turns, they have to have developed a sense of self, and others. They will learn that they are an individual person, which is different from an object. And others are also individual people, which are different from objects, with feelings just like the child. So sharing and taking turns makes other people happy, just like